Development of a Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged, and Safe (QuEChERS) Method for the Analysis of Lipid Biomarkers in Archaeological Sedimentary Deposits

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The analysis of lipid biomarkers plays an important role in sedimentological studies because these compounds are representative of particular sources (plants, macrophytes, algae, bacteria, and animals) and are likely to persist after burial. Frequently, their analysis involves methodologies, such as ultrasound assisted extraction, accelerated solvent extraction, Bligh and Dyer method, Folch method, etc., with high consumption of contaminant solvents, time and reagents. Following the principles of Green Analytical Chemistry, agrifood and environmental researchers have developed a particularly important methodology with positive results for analysis of different kinds of contaminants (i.e. pesticides, antibiotics, endocrine disruptors, mycotoxins, etc.): the so-called QuEChERS method (Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged, and Safe). Despite the inherent advantages of the mentioned protocol, it has not been applied to lipid biomarkers in sedimentary contexts. In this work, we investigated the applicability of QuEChERS in this field, optimizing the parameters affecting the extraction efficiency (type, acidity and volume of extraction solvent, amount of salts added, type and amount of sorbents, and humidity of sample) and validating the methodology in terms of linearity, detection limits and recoveries. Then, the methodology was applied to archaeological sedimentary samples and lipids were determined by gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometer detector.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Charred Organic Matter in the Archaeological Sedimentary Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25467